


Hands

by perch



Category: 07-Ghost
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:38:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perch/pseuds/perch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snippets from Frau's childhood with Bastian. I spelled it with an a as that's how the Go!Comi version does it so I apologize if that's jarring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WhiteCat](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=WhiteCat).



**Frau - The Boy Who Ran Away Nightly**

 

"Piss off old man," Frau growled, getting ready to jump from the window.

Bishop Bastian's bascule impaled Frau's frock, pining him to the wall. Again.

'Damn bastard, that's the thirteenth time this week,' Frau thought, dangling from the wall.

"Let me down you bastard!" he ranted, his arms and feet dangling.

"We'll read from book 10 today," Bastian continued, his dark eyes calm as he opened the book of scriptures.

"Piss off!" Frau said again.

This pattern repeated year after year until Frau's feet were able to stay on the ground even when pinned down.

***  
**Bastian - The Bishop Finds His Important Person**

Frau was perhaps twelve or thirteen, who could be bothered to remember ages in the sky, when he pulled out his first ill-concealed porn magazine and tried to shock Bastian. He was younger the first time he snuck out and started defeating the Kor from citizens too ashamed to come seeking aid at the church. This odd dichotomy, bobbing back and forth from delinquent to compassionate helper tugged on Bastian in ways he'd forgotten, concealed, and never felt from his own time.

He'd always believed there was more to Frau than anyone else could see; even before he found out about the healings and just assumed Frau was escaping the suffocating confines of sanctuary and his own too sad heart. He'd watched the liquid grace of Frau's Zaiphon, the hard, lost blue eyes of a child exposed to too much death and the defiance of a restless spirit.

"You're my important person," Bastian told him while snatching him from a tree where he'd sat waiting for darkness and a chance to escape the rigors of the church and the belief in a diety that Frau could only hate.

"God loves you," Bastian explained, reaching for the boy to give him a hug.

"Screw God," Frau said, backing away from Bastian's outstretched arms. "If God loved me, why didn't he take me with my friends?"

"If he had, then I wouldn't have gotten to meet you," Bastian stated.

The boy didn't say anything his face twisted with memories. The vaguely threatening reach of the Bishop's arms were like tentacles coming to squeeze him into submission through a combination of unnecessary unconditional love and the utterances of scriptures.

 

***  
**Wild Child - Take the Boy from the Pirates, but not the Pirate from the Boy**

"Aren't you afraid," one of the other children asked, when they bothered to ask Frau anything at all. He was balanced in one of the openings high above their heads.

"Nah, before I was taken here, I used to be way in the sky, something like this is nothing," Frau bragged.

"I heard he was a pirate," one boy whispered to the other.

"I heard he's still one, flipping the girls skirts up and stealing!" another joined in.

"Yeah, but none of the pirates came to get him so he's all alone," a third added.

"I can still hear you, you bastards," Frau called down, leaping from his spot to nimbly make his way back down.

The other children scattered.

"Just as well," he muttered to himself, wandering over to where the nun's bathed. "Brats would interfere with my leisure time."

***  
**Changing Values - A Kindly Hand **

"I wanted them to come back for me," Frau said, sitting on the ledge.

"I'll always be with you," Bastian said. It was the first time Frau had let him touch him. One gentle hand on his head. Frau had always avoided the creep's advances, offers of hugs, scriptures. He'd stolen meat, flipped the nun's skirts, gone peeping, left the church every night he could get away with it, but always he was alone and sad and heavy.

Everything always felt heavy, like the air was dragging him down. Only removing Kor from the people who wouldn't come to the church, who couldn't bring themselves to accept sanctuary, like he himself couldn't, made him feel better. Lighter. Bastian did too. Bastian's hand felt good on his head.

He still wasn't giving up meat though. Okay, maybe the meat. But definitely not the nuns. Plus he'd discovered a stash of porn magazines. And he wasn't going to start believing in that bastard God either, but for Bastian's sake, maybe he could try for the priesthood. Because Bastian was there. He was always there when Frau came back from his nightly wanderings. Bastian with his scriptures and his warm hand.

***  
**Growing Pains - Hearing the Voices of the Dead **

"I'm changing," Frau said.

"Well, boys go through changes," Bastian responded, glancing at the growing man by his side.

"No, I don't mean like that," Frau said, rubbing his right hand. "It feels...heavy."

"Let me see," Bastian pulled him towards him and examined the fingers, the wrist, pulling off Frau's glove before wiggling a knuckle. "Everything looks okay."

Frau schooled his features not to flinch when only bare skeletal fingers were revealed, but Bastian seemed to not notice.

"Did you just want an excuse to hold my hand?" Bastian teased, squeezing his bones together. "Still a kid, but it's okay I'll hold your hand as long as you need."

Frau pushed him away, pulling his glove back on.

"Stupid."

***  
**Beloved - The Sprout and His Death**

Bastian's hand was always warm and kind. Even when Frau murdered him in the form of Zehel, he still remembered that kindness and returned it with a swift death. That hand that he loved for so long, that hand that nurtured him, but let him grow in his own wild ways was gone.

"Beloved," Frau whispered to himself later, much later, when all the lights were gone and only the darkness of his coffin existed.

This is just one more death, he thought to himself and felt the same heaviness of his childhood in the too frequent empty spaces of his heart. He ran his hands through his hair, staring at the lid or where the lid would be if he could see in the pitch black. He pushed his hands against the wood, lightly, to feel.

Later, after conversations and punches and lamentations and graves the nun came with a sprout. One tiny, gentle sprout in a pot with the color of his beloved. It came from the Eve tree and Frau understood, that again, once again he was given a chance to be with his important person. He made sure it was planted in the best possible spot in the garden: sunny, bright and well tended.

And that night a Death sat in a tree, watching over his sprout.

**Author's Note:**

> Big thank you to my husband for the beta.


End file.
